


Girl with One Eye

by codenamecynic



Series: It came from the tumblr-verse [26]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, First Impressions, Humor, Trolling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 22:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10500333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/pseuds/codenamecynic
Summary: Sometimes you have to prove you're more than your past missions.





	

The first time Kaidan ever lays eyes on Shepard, he and Jenkins almost knock her off her feet.  Her hair is wet and it makes her look severe, slicked back from her face and tied into a regulation bun.  God only knows where they’ve dug her up from – Shepard’s reputation precedes her, as does the official sparseness of her military record that implies the kind of action that doesn’t get written down on paper – but she wears her dress blues as though they are the only clothing she’s ever owned.  And he is pretty sure that the two fifty-pound crates delivered for her that morning are full of nothing but guns.

The thing that gets him, though, is the eye patch.  Black and foreboding, she turns her head to the left to peer down at Jenkins with her good eye.  Her brow lifts and then lowers, faint lines crinkling the center of her forehead.

Jenkins nearly shits himself, almost knocks himself out trying to salute with a clipboard in his hand, and doesn’t shut up about it for the next two hours.

Kaidan runs into her later in the mess, after she’s settled in.  The dress blues are gone in favor of a plain on-board service uniform and her hair has dried, softening around her face.  It’s strange that it doesn’t do much to make her look less serious.  He supposes it’s in her posture, the rigid back and the knee that constantly bounces as though she expects to have to leap from her chair at any moment, the tap of her fingers on her thigh where a sidearm would holster in a hardsuit; the tension manifests itself in a buffer around her, space that the crew has not yet obtained the bravery to breach.

Still, she chooses to be there, sipping a cup of coffee and perusing a datapad in silence, present but not intruding.  It strikes him as deliberate - a method of coping, perhaps, of someone too used to trading out one unit for another, someone who knows that sometimes her history does the talking before she even has the chance to open her mouth.

Maybe she’s waiting for an opening – a joke to laugh at, a request to pass the salt.  It’s what he would do, he realizes.  Kaidan relishes being good at his job, but long ago accepted that this comes with no particular ease with making friends.

Shepard looks up at him when he crosses the room, just for a moment, and that’s when it hits him – her eye patch has changed sides, covering the right eye instead of the left.

The corner of her mouth quirks upward faintly; she knows he noticed, and it’s all he can do not to laugh out loud.  Jenkins is going to lose it when he figures it out; he and Joker spent an hour and half on the extranet trying to figure out when the infamous Butcher of Torfan lost an eye, the nerds.  Not that he hadn’t helped, had maybe written a query or two…

“Commander Shepard.”

“Staff Lieutenant Alenko,” she deadpans, and hides the faint smile behind her cup.

Shepard switches the patch out four more times before Jenkins finally catches on, and the first thing the kid does is email his mother.


End file.
